Samuel_Tow

Yes, yes, I know, but your nit-pick isn't really a nit-pick. In most people, even over-muscled ones, their butt crack only goes up to the waist, which is fairly smooth, and the spine ridge only starts up at above there. The way Atlas is drawn up in the new statue, it looks like if you took away his belt, he'd have a trench from the bottom of his neck right down to the butt, and that's just weird-looking. Even if we assume the guy had a big butt, his butt cheeks would more stick out than tuck in under his belt.

Because right now, either Atlas' crack goes all the way up his back, or otherwise he buckles his belt across his butt cheeks. Neither proposition is very good.

That's something else I noticed. The old statue looked like it was kneeling down under the weight of the world, yes, but his footing looked much more secure and firmer. What he has now, though not "bad," strictly speaking, just doesn't look like a person carrying a heavy object. He's essentially on his top-toes, and I don't see why he'd do that.

I get that they're of a higher difficulty, but I'm not sure I understand how they're of a SIGNIFICANTLY higher difficulty. Could you explain this to me? And I mean that as a genuine question, not a trap. I get that the Honoree is a tough EB, but then so is Miss Liberty and Silver Mantis and Lord Recluse with his zillions of boss spanws. I get that Trapdoor is a gimmick fight, but then so is Castillo and the Cooling titan, and so is Protean. It's harder, yes, but is it really by this much? Why? Hell, I'd say the "zillions of Ghouls" mission in Praetoria is much harder, and the one from Sister Airlia where four Longbow ambushes, including a Ballista, all spawn on top of you at the same time, and you only have to lose Ghost Widow who shows up there as a fragile EB.

And again - if the solo Incarnate difficulty were as hard as Ramiel, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Ramiel's base missions are about stock, the enemies aren't that bad, and it's the occasional fights with named enemies where the difficulty really spikes. And, really... That's how it should be. I've always wanted most of a mission to be fairly easy to build up both confidence and ego, only to end in a hard fight that contrasts the rest of the content so as to make it seem more serious. Eventually winning that fight is, then, that much more satisfying because it was a "harder" fight, but still successful.

No, not this one. This is Xanta, my giant green swordswoman. I'll try to get a "modded" screenshot of her with the muscular skin on when I figure out which client on what machine had that. The one you're thinking of - my "literal cow girl" is Mary-Beth, my biker cow. She's only a Mace Brute, but her mace is quite big. I'll think about making her Titan Weapons, but not quite yet.

Croatora's maps are annoying to me because they're essentially fields. It's very hard to break them down into sections, and trying to tackle a huge map all at once is so daunting as to be unfun. I usually try to break them down by terrain features, like "I will take this hill from where it starts to where it clips with the next hill." or "This section between the lake shore and the line between those boulders and then from that wooded area to the continuation of this cliff is one section. I'll handle that first." It's not as comfortable, however.

That one actually splits itself. You have three hills in an L formation, so each hill is its own "block," plus the fourth quarter in the L is another block. Then you have the block that's between the line of where you start to the hills straight ahead and the war wall to the right and the hills ahead and the blue wall behind, one block at the beach near the hills, one block for the offset island and one more for "everything else." I have that one down pretty well It's just a lot of open ground, though, which is a bit of a pain for combat.

Of course. As I said, the mole points concept is a good idea. In fact, you know what I'd like to see? A Task Force that's not split up into multiple missions, but is actually one giant instance pretty much the size of a separate zone. In fact, I wouldn't mind it if a TF was essentially an instance of an entire zone, with many objectives popping up around it as we accomplished them. Like, say, an instance of the Abandoned Sewer Network, where you had to reach various places to do various things in them. Or like an instance such as I described before that's a linear series of different tilesets.

If you die, you go back to the start, but you can always warp back to the latest "mole point." If such a mission worked like an Ouro TF or an SSA - which is to say it's a one-man doable TF - then this instance could persist beyond play sessions even for a single player, thus saving progress. While the instance itself may reset and thus repopulate with enemies, you would always be able to go back to your latest objective and your latest mole point. I'd LOVE that.

That's easy enough, actually, if you pick your objectives right. A large map with a single objective in it is just begging to be stealthed, but a large map with many objectives scattered throughout it just has to be taken one step at a time. Or if scattered objectives seems too chaotic, then the map could be populated by chained objectives, where players have to go from one to the other to the next and so forth. One of the reasons people stealth missions is because most only have one objective at the end and everything before that is seen as an obstacle. But pepper objectives all throughout, link them in a chain and slap a defeat-counter before each one shows up similar to the "Defeat 300 Spartans!" one in the ITF, and you have a mechanism that has to be played out step by step without physically blocking people's movement powers.

The Hive is a very beautiful zone, actually. I went there once a long time ago, just to see what the zone looked like, but it's so hard to get around. Everything is a Monster and everything that isn't is a souped-up Swarm that's all over the place. These things hounded me the entire time until I just dove into the Hamidon jello for an instakill to get away from them. The zone is pretty cool, though. It's pretty unique and not just a veritable copy of another like Dark Astoria without the fog is.

I actually really like the Hazard and Trial zones we have in the game. Terra Volta has been one of my long-time favourites. Yeah, it's kind of pointless and yeah, it's kind of wasted space, but you know what? It's pretty BECAUSE it's such wasted space. It's a huge, sprawling industrial complex that still takes my breath away to this day. City of Villains brought us an economy of small things, where everything is miniature and crammed in the same map as everything else to the point where there's little reason to explore. When every part of the map is a monolithic whole, you can pretty much see what it's about from the air high above. Something like Terra Volta, on the other hand, pretty much is a few square miles of industrial complex, so what's actually happening at ground level becomes more important. I would personally love to see a TF in an instance of Terra Volta where we had 20 or 30 different objectives in different parts of the map.

Maybe that's just me having played a sandbox game lately, and maybe City of Heroes really isn't shooting for a sandbox type of game despite having an overworld, but I honestly do miss the act of getting places being meaningful, and I do miss the time when places were big and monolithic. Having five different zones crammed together into the same island is just... It feels like the developers were saving space more than it feels like a realistic city, and that takes me out of the experience.

Heh, why not? So long as that comes with an actual map that shows the actual paths through the trees, I'd be all for it. Have a new tileset that's ALL paths through the trees with no clearings or open air spaces. In fact, I'd go the extra mile and do it like Eden, where the forest has engulfed a city, so you occasionally run into buildings smack-dab in the middle of the forest, or you see pieces of intersections with traffic lights still attached, or city vehicles buried in the undergrowth. That could make for a really cool tileset.

While I agree with this, the reverse of this is equally untrue. You can't have a good story in a very inconsistent world. To a great extent, a good story involves its audience, brings them into its world, allows them to understand this world and even invites them to speculate on how the story might unfold. You can't do that in a world where ret-con is the first law of reality. You can't engage your audience if you make it clear to them that nothing matters. At that point, it's no longer a story so much watching the Mystify screen saver. To quote spy dogs: "Things are happening in places all over the world." Things happen, but we have no reason to care, because the author doesn't care enough to not wipe these things out of existence in the next chapter.

A good story does not need to start with a previously prepared whole world. It can very much build the world around the main narrative. That's fine. But it has to build a world which is at least consistent with itself, and consistent in at least the elements that concern the main plot. Otherwise, you get "The Hamidon is a what what of what?!?"

I imagine it still will be. A level 42 boss is +2 to a level 40 character and cons +2 on top of that, which makes him purple. I imagine if the Trial featured minions and lieutenants then those wouldn't be, but in the six or so times I've run it, I've never seen a single minion and I've only seen a handful of lieutenants. The entire Trial is almost nothing bug bosses.

I actually think they made the right call with Siege. On Primal Earth, he's just a buff-looking robot which is - to be frank - very boring. On Praetorian Earth, he has shed his old body and is instead using one of the new battle mech bodies - those of the War Walkers. If you were a warmongering machine and had the choice of any body, would you not pick the biggest, heaviest and most heavily-armed? I'd become an aircraft carrier, personally

I can see how the difference between Nightstar and Siege might look bad on the surface, but it seems to me that Nightstar primarily went for style while Siege primarily went for power. Could Nightstar have gotten War Works body, too? Yeah, but that would have made them clones. Could Nightstar have gotten a War Works body INSTEAD? Probably, but Siege's original model from Primal Earth is singularly uninspired, so he's the better candidate for a new body. Besides, Night Star is insane and believes the full moon on that one particular alternate Earth gives her powers, so it makes sense she'd go for style. I just have to wonder why she has blades on her arms.

That's actually an approach I'd love if they used. They have half of it right - the Trial AVs are powered up, so it's explicitly unfair against the players. That's fine, but you have to give us opportunities to fight their unpowered selves so that we can get a sense of how lost they are without their benefaction.

To bring up wrestling, that's a very basic "good guy bad guy" storyline. The bad guys cheat, and they win by cheating. They run away when they're outmatched, they strike when the good guys are the weakest and they have help. But when you bring them down to a fair fight at the pay-per-view, they lose, because the bad guys can't win in a fair fight. You put over the good guys by showing them as being strong, but still manage to build tension by denying them the fair fight in which their strength could win the day.

Now, granted, we do get to fight all the Praetorian EBs in Maria Jenkins' arc, but in the game's timeline, all this happens "before" we become Incarnates. At no point in the actual Incarnate storyline do we get to take them on without divine intervention powering them up.

Why not, for instance, have a run-of-the-mill AV Marauder show up in the middle of a Trial that his souped-up version isn't part of? He could come in, try to make a difference, get beat up and teleport away. Once he's rested up, he shows up again and gets beaten up again. Say, like the Admiral Stutter TF where when you beat Praetorian Duray, clones of him keep coming in to replace him. Sure, it's still a raid, but at least it shows us that... Hey, without his bid daddy, that guy isn't so scary!

Quite well, actually. Battle Axe is not too dissimilar from Broadsword in terms of base damage, save for two powers - it swaps Parry for a much stronger single-target attack and it swaps Slice for a much stronger, bigger cone. Beyond that, base numbers are similar. You have:

Beheader/Slash: 1.0 scale damage
Hack/Chop: 1.64
Whirling Sword/Whirling Axe: 1.0
Disembowel: 1.9 / Gash 1.96
Head Splitter: 2.6 / Cleave 2.76

Then Battle Axe also has:

Swoop: 2.28
Pendulum: 1.9

In terms of single-target damage, Battle Axe and Titan Weapons are not too far apart, honestly. Crushing Blow is about on par with Gash and Follow Through is about on par with Swoop, though Follow Through being momentum-locked makes is slightly faster-recharging and cheaper, but on that front the sets are well-matched.

Sadly, Battle Axe has no answer for Rend Armour at 3.12 scale single target damage, as Swoop actually IS the set's largest single-target attack at 1.96. However, Cleave is balanced like a single-target attack, but even if we count that, it's not close enough at 2.76.

The reason I'm reluctant to bring up Cleave is I'd sooner compare it to Arc of Destruction, which is a large cone at 2.596. It's not quite as damaging, but it's many times bigger in terms of cone range.

Initially, I was going to say that Battle Axe wins in the AoE department, as its Pendulum is a very large, very heavy cone. That was because I wanted to compare it to Titan Sweep or Whirling Smash, but Arc of Destruction is what it most closely resembles. Pendulum has a cone range of 7 feet with a 180 degree arc, or around 80 square feet, at a damage scale of 1.9, which is not bad at all. Thing is, Arc of Destruction is a 10-foot, 120 degree cone, or around 105 square feet, at a damage scale of 2.596. Hell, even if I were generous and compared it, instead, with Titan Sweep, that still has a larger area of 105 square feet and a 1.429 scale damage. Granted, that's quite a bit lower, but it's a T3 attack you can take at level 2.

Lastly, I think we can pair up Whirling Smash at 1.15 with Whirling Axe at 1.0, but Whirling Smash wins. It's a bigger AoE with slightly more damage. I guess that's to be expected since the power is Momentum-locked, but it's just one more thing.

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Now, obviously, the two sets aren't the same and can't be compared on a power-to-power basis. Titan Weapons is an AoE set, so it's obvious it would win out in AoE. What I'm surprised by, however, is just how strong it is in single target, too. Yes, it has fewer attacks, but this is the only set I've ever seen that combines both such powerful single target AND such powerful AoE. I'm just about convinced that Arc of Destruction may well be the most powerful AoE attack available to a melee character short of Incarnate powers.

People always bring up Foot Stomp, but you know what Foot Stomp is? It's a 1.42 scale damage AoE. Yeah, it has a long range and a 10-target cap, but Whirling Smash comes close, and Arc of Destruction is just... Wow. It's a ~2.6 scale very large cone. Again, that's Head Splitter at over six times the cone range.

And single target? While the set doesn't go quite as far as to drop in a Knockout Blow, it comes pretty damn close. Knockout Blow is a scale 3.56 damage attack, and Rend Armour goes up to 3.212 scale. Again, it's not quite Knockout Blow, not by quite a bit, but it's close enough to be meaningful in a set with such huge AoE otherwise.

Battle Axe seems about on par. It doesn't have quite as much shock damage in either single target or AoE, but it's still a solid set without a single weak attack that can just keep on swinging. But I'm just concerned about it and Broadsword because they seem to be outclassed, somewhat.

See, originally, Scrapper sets were given overall lower damage mods, capping at around 2.5, give or take a few tenths, plus fairly limited AoE. Tanker sets, by contrast, were given both large AoE powers AND huge shock damage powers. Stone Melee gets Disembowel at level 2 in the form of Heavy Mallet AND gets a 3.56 scale damage attack in Seismic Smash at level 18 (I think) AND still gets a large, if not very poweful AoE AND gets an AoE control power in Fault.

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I really don't mind Titan Weapons as it's balanced and I don't want to see it nerfed. Far from it. I'm just saying that this is the first time I've seen a set's gimmick allow a set to be this powerful, where gimmicks in the past have almost universally kneecapped the sets they're in and made them have to work harder just to break even. Dual Pistols is a great example. Without Swap Ammo, this set is garbage, and it's balanced to be garbage, because Swap Ammo is seen to be such a huge advantage to the set that it's supposed to make up for it.

Titan Weapons is the reverse. Were this set launched without Momentum and with Follow Through and Whirling Smash rebalanced to match, it would be about average, probably on par with and even a bit lower than Battle Axe. But WITH Momentum, this average set becomes great. That, to me, is a gimmick done right. When the gimmick adds more to an already solid set, rather than forcing the set to be launched gimped with the promise that the gimmick will make it at least average, that's a gimmick done right.

It seems to me that both Titan Weapons and Street Justice strike pretty much the right balance in both gameplay complexity and numbers. I find both sets to be incredibly powerful, yet many still see them as under-performing. That in itself suggests they're just right.

The reason I see it as a lack of creativity has to do with what I see "creativity" itself as. A creative person is someone who takes parts and tools provided, but creates something new and unique which goes beyond what the creators of the tools and parts envisioned, even if just a little bit. If you literally take exactly what the creators have envisioned and use it exactly as they have envisioned it being used, you are not creative, because you are not creating anything. You are simply using someone else's work wholesale.

This is the difference between character CREATION as we have here and character SELECTION as in a game like Diablo or Dungeon Fighter or Rusty Hearts. There's nothing inherently wrong with selecting a costume someone else made if that's what you want, but I personally see it as uncreative, because it's not, strictly speaking, "your" costume. It's someone else's costume you're borrowing. Someone had to show creativity to make it and put it together, yes, but it simply wasn't you. If you're not interested in creativity or leaving your own mark on your game, then that's fine. To each his own.

However - and this is where my bias comes in - I really have no interest in reusing other people's work. Even when I blatantly rip people off, I still try to inject enough of my own spin on it to make it distinct enough to be my own. I can't feel like I "own" a character if someone else made it for me. The only way I can feel like a character is truly my own is to customize this character in a way that other people won't be likely to replicate at complete random.

That's why costume sets bug me - because I'm never, ever going to use an entire set of anything. I will always try to mix and match between sets, and the easier this is to do, the better I'll like it.

I do remember you, actually. I can't quite place what I remember you for, but I definitely remember the name, and possibly the avatar.

Well, I wouldn't want to go as far as corpse runs But for all the convenience City of Heroes has over a classic MMO, I'd still like to see at least one or two dungeon crawls done proper. The Eden Trial is a good start, I suppose, but I'd like more of that, and not timed (and not a Trial ), preferably. A few existing missions work like dungeon crawls, actually, but again - I'd like to see more. I'd especially like to see a dungeon crawl that took me through several kinds of terrain.

Saw we start in an office building where something is happening, and it turns out there's a hole leading into a network of caves. When we clear the caves, they descend down into an old sewer system. That sewer system descends into an old crypt, which then descends into an old abandoned mine, and we eventually end up at an uncharted section of Oranbega. That could make for a huge map, yes, but I'd play it.

Actually, one of my favourite missions is the CoV one where we fight Lilithu with a ghost trap on hand. It's a fairly large Oranbega instance with a prison on the far side which forces you to walk out instead of just hitting Exit. One time I played it, I beat Lilithu who was right at the entrance, but her cronies took me down and I spawned in the prison deep inside. The rest of my missions was me fighting my way back out to the surface. I died a few times, but all that did was send me back to the prison which I controlled. I had fun, at least

I agree. That's a really cool map just because there's so much there to clear, but it's still an orderly location. I actually like all of the large outdoor city and industrial maps. Anything I can split down into separate blocks and tackle in an orderly fashion excites me. It's the nature outdoor maps which I actually hate because there's no good way to segment them down into smaller sections.

Sure! Shoot me a global friends request at @Samuel Tow and we can I just need to get my Titan Weapons Brute up to Abandoned Sewers level.

That's where I stand. I hate being the reason a task fails, and that's not so much out of some sense of altruism that I don't want to impede people's fun. Much more selfishly, when I'm the reason a task fails, I leave feeling like crap. Even when it's unavoidable, like I just didn't have enough level shifts or something, I still leave feeling like I was worthless and the team would have been better off without me. And that's not the kind of feeling a game should inspire.

Bad Influence mentions "fun," and that's an important point to remember. I've often brought up the key problem I see with Incarnate content - it makes us overall seem weaker than before we became Incarnates - and yet people tell me that this is just because our threats are now all the bigger. While that may be logical, it doesn't make it fun. Being more powerful is not expressed through seeing bigger numbers in your character sheet, it's expressed by what you can do, and when an Incarnate in his own content can do far less and need far more help than I can in mine, then Incarnates in general feel like they've become weaker.

Frankly, I feel that the raid mentality is exactly the opposite of what Incarnates should have represented. At its core, City of Heroes is an empowerment fantasy. We take on hordes of goons, we fight giant monsters and look good doing it. Throughout the game, though we may fight tougher enemies, we always get tangibly stronger and more confident in our abilities. Then all of a sudden we're gnats before the might of god-modding NPCs. The raid mentality and the balance point it brings is why Incarnates feel like a step DOWN the ladder.

I have and I do, actually. A mention of it should be buried somewhere in my walls of text For the sake of specificity, though, I want to address a particular anecdote.

Quite a while ago, Zamuel recruited me for an Abandoned Sewer Trial. We formed a team of 8, won the Trial with plenty of time to spare and everyone Ouro-ported back to the city. Everyone, except for myself and Zamuel. I posed a suggestion along the lines of "Hey, do you want to actually walk out? Say out of the Boomtown gate?" Zam agreed, so we spent I think the next hour fighting our way through an incalculable number of Circle of Thorns and Rikti, slowly tracking back up to the surface. We both levelled up and we had a blast. I personally enjoyed the trek up more so than the Trial itself. We came damn close to losing it quite a few times, since we did die from time to time, and at times ran out of Awaken inspirations (that was before Return to Battle), but we did manage to make it all the way to Boomtown under our own steam.

I forget what level we were at the time, but I want to say 38 or 39, at least to start with, and the sewers spawn stuff from 36 all the way to 41 or 42, so it was a hectic experience where one fight might be a walk in the park and a chance to restock on inspirations while the next one might toss four purple-con Death Mages at us at the same time. Because it's outdoors, enemies respawn and their levels are unpredictable, which really did a lot to try and ruin the experience, but we had fun even despite that. I'd like to do it again some time, but you try suggesting that some time and see how it goes

Basically, yes - a sewer trek is more or less what I mean. However, I want something that's at least a tad more controlled in terms of spawn difficulty and something that goes through more environments. Yes, we had fun going from the Hydra chamber to the Boomtown gate, but I think both of us were sick of sewers by that point. Going through the odd cave or underground base or some such would have improved the experience significantly. Making this an actually supported activity would be an improvement, as well.

I feel the Shadow Shard is by FAR the game's biggest wasted opportunity. It has an amazing storyline in there that's been begging to be explored for the last seven years, and while that might happen in the future, I don't see it being any time soon. Beyond that, the place is simply breathtaking. It just goes to show that you don't need DX11 graphics to make something beautiful when you have artists who have skill and vision. It's also the game's ONLY place that ever feels truly remote, both because it's so bizarre in its appearance and because you can go four zones in and four zones away from habitation.

I feel that the cop-out teleporters were essentially the tombstone atop the grave that that place had become at the time. We wanted something more made of the Shard and complained it was too hard to move around in, so they slapped there teleporters to take us to the various zones and called it a day, when that was never the intent. The Mole Points are one of the game's best ideas - you need to move forward and away from your comfort zone to reach them BEFORE you can use them, and at best they're a cave of huddled survivors amid a world that's too dangerous for them to get out into.

I really want to see something happen to the Shadow Shard, and I hope that something ISN'T meteorites falling on it and destroying three of the four zones while putting the Chantry and the Storm Palace next to each other.

That doesn't make sense, actually. How are they not specific enough? Isn't that the point? They're tuned to each AT, that's specific enough in my book. Epics give you the choice of either extending your own powers theme, or otherwise breaking into a wholly new theme besides the ones you have. Say, an Ice/Fire/Earth Tanker.

What you've suggested is several new Epics, plus a rebranding of Flame/Pyre Mastery.

That's not a bad idea, actually, and it's pretty much the most we can do with the tools we're given. I think the problem with City of Heroes is it's designed to use random maps every time, so we're never really "connected" to the location where an event is taking place... But our maps aren't actually random. It's been my experience that each tileset has at most 30 or 40 maps hand-made for it, and when you run missions from the same tileset for seven years, you simply begin to learn the maps by heart.

I think back to the original Diablo and how much stupid fun its random maps were. A lot of the time they were bizarre and inexplicable, like two feet of disembodied wall in the middle of a large chamber, with a door through it, or a very long, straight corridor that led to absolutely nothing at all (though sometimes it had a chest at the end). It's kind of like that old Wrestlemania Arcade/PC which was so bugged as to be almost unpredictable, and that made it funny. It's that sense of "I wonder what's coming next?" That City of Heroes is built to invoke, but completely fails to do so because none of it is ever random.

And also, it just bugs me that in every map and every location, terrain simply doesn't matter. If there's a high ledge, we can fly to it. If there's a building in the way, we can jump over it. If there's a deep pit, we can teleport across it. It's to the point where people who take Super Speed for concept transform into prima donnas who feel hurt that the city should bend to their will and grant them ramps to everywhere they want to go. Sometimes I wish we were forced to take the stairs or the bridge or the long way around, just so it feels like terrain matters. Because for all the game cares, the whole thing might as well be taking place in Aperture Labs.

I'm sorry. You can keep it if you want. I don't mind

That's been my impression of the playerbase at large, actually. People often chastise me for not wanting to team and tell me I'm anti-social or whatever the word of the day is... But because of how people want to run their content, other people just ruin my fun. I'm wholly uninterested in the end reward and just want to run through a mission and kill stuff, and most teams I'm on just want the rewards at the end.

I guess in a big way, I just like to see that I'm making progress, and visually, not just by looking at numbers. For instance, when I run one of the older outdoor instances - the large city ones - I tend to go at them block by block, circling around each block via the streets, then going inside to clear enemies out of the interior, then moving onto the next one. At the start, it looks like it will never end, but half-way through when I look at my map, I can visually see that I'm making progress. Much of the map has already been explored and is "clear." When I go though one of those linear Oranbegan maps and I get two thirds of the way to the end, then I look at the map, I can tell I'm a long way into that cave.

I like the sense of physical progression through a location, is what I mean. "The goal" is less a direct objective and more an end point for me, where the actual goal is to actually get to that end point, and in the most entertaining way possible, as opposed to the quickest. Maybe that's not as popular in this game, I honestly don't know... I don't think it's popular. But I do wish we had more missions that rewarded us for actually going through them, rather than teleporting to the end.